One year after its publication the documentary passed the first million clicks on the Internet on Matthias’ vimeo account and it’s copies on other person’s video accounts. The film was publish free for everybody middle of October 2015 and has been re-edited a couple of times in 2016.

The Story of Technoviking will be presented on 27.5. in Vienna in the frame of the music film screening series Film 4 free by MY Sound Of Music at fluc, Praterstern 5.
They show the full 90min Version with german and english subtitles. Start 9 pmEntrance free

The Creative Commons Film Festival Barcelona presents “The Story of Technoviking” on May 13 at MACBA, Museum for contemporary art Barcelona. The screening will be followed by a discussing with Abel Garriga (a lawyer specialized in licenses -copyright or free ones-) about the difficulty to apply pre-digital laws to digital world.

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The Technoviking

Technoviking is one of the early YouTube memes. It is based on the video "Kneecam No.1" by German film maker Matthias Fritsch, featuring a tall, muscular, charismatic German man in his 30ies, that danced in front of the camera at the Fuckparade in Berlin in 2000.

At YouTube the fascination with the Technoviking is expressed in several statements. One of the most famous lines started to reappear with the countless remakes of the "original" footage itself: "The Technoviking doesn't dance to the music, but the music dances to the Technoviking."

The Context

The Technoviking project is an example for the reordering, re-editing and remaking of an "original" video in the internet. The original video is in analogy to genes called a meme. As such the original and its first clones, start to circulate within social networks, where the original mutates, competes with other originals and inherits. Becoming multiplied in this way, the original video becomes successful by reproducing itself, through various recycling techniques.

Film maker Matthias Fritsch spend more than 6 years to collect the most outstanding user reactions in the Technoviking-Archive.

The Trial

The legal trouble around the Technoviking meme started in December 2009. The original video's main protagonist sent a lawyer to the filmmaker in order to stop all further publication. At that time the clip was already out of the filmmakers control for some years. It existed with hundreds of original and thousands of remixed copies all over the web.

From 2012 till 2014 it continued as a trial that went to Berlins highest court. The judges decided that it is not allowed to show the original video anymore without making the protagonist unrecognizable.